In ‘Cartwheel,’ American author Amanda Knox tells her story through comedy

Quick, guess what Amanda Knox’s Wikifeet rating is. It’s OK to laugh. The whole concept is ridiculous (and the answer is 4.42/5). Which is why it’s the opening idea of Knox’s new solo comedy show, “Cartwheel,” which she performed in its entirety for the first time this month in a Woodinville wine tasting room. Knox is a compelling, natural stage presence, unspooling this autobiographical story — in a performance space strewn with tiny clothes and stuffed animals — of a goofy Seattle theatre kid who ended up in extraordinary legal circumstances that she’s seeing with new eyes since becoming a mom some five years ago.

“I feel a little emotionally hung over from it,” she said in a Zoom call the next morning, sitting in front of a kid’s indoor play structure, a fluffy cat tail meandering intermittently into frame. (The home office was occupied, she said with a laugh.)

She’s “getting her reps in” performing “Cartwheel” in Seattle — you can see her July 30-Aug. 2 at the Rabbit Box Theatre in Pike Place Market — before tackling a longer run at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August.

It’s no surprise that telling this story, no matter how funny this version is (and it is very funny), takes an emotional toll.

Knox’s public-facing story began in September 2007, when the University of Washington junior went to study abroad in Perugia, Italy. Two months later, her roommate and friend, British student Meredith Kercher, was murdered. Knox was arrested for the crime and spent nearly four years in an Italian prison (and became an international tabloid sensation) during a lengthy, labyrinthine trial and appeal process that finally ended when she was fully exonerated by the Italian Supreme Court in 2015.

How do you explain a story like that to your kids? And how do you let an audience know they’re allowed to laugh?

“Motherhood is a great template for talking about things that are both really dramatic and really funny, because being a parent is really dramatic and really funny,” Knox said of the framework for “Cartwheel.” (The title comes from a tabloid story claiming that Knox did a cartwheel in an Italian police station; if you want to know if that’s true you’ll have to see the show.)

And motherhood — both her own and her mother’s — is the through line of “Cartwheel,” which Knox has been shaping with husband and frequent collaborator Christopher Robinson.

Growing from a free-spirited kid into an “Amelie wannabe” young adult, as she puts it, Knox had only ever experienced her quirkiness as a positive. “In 2007, being a whimsical lunatic was hot,” she says in her show, of coming of age in the height of the manic-pixie-dream-girl era. The international media begged to differ.

“The subject of (‘Cartwheel’) is like, ‘I’m raising a goofy kid, but I was punished for being goofy,’ and the fact that the show is itself goofy is a commentary,” she said.

Tribune News Service